“Always make the audience suffer as much as possible. A
glimpse into the world proves that horror is nothing other than reality.”
Alfred Hitchcock’s own quote about Psycho
is more than adequate for any analysis of why we watch Paul Thomas Anderson; it
is the marquee of his mastery. A master of scene development, Anderson presses
us to hold attention for not a glimpse but an inward journey. Quite the
competition of the Andersons this year for Best Picture, the arguments will
stem from a preference for construing a story: while Wes Anderson shows us a
beautiful picture in totality, Paul Thomas Anderson shows us a focused subject
that engages our commitment as if there was a person to converse with us.
The story revolves around the relationship that forms
between the characters of Freddie (Phoenix) and Lancaster (Hoffman). Far from
being an extensively detailed waltz between two competing auteurs as the trailer almost led us to believe, the story is a
crafted cruise, churning the dark and clear waters we think are so easily
separated, of how two men trying to walk a road that frightens them to their
core can so very often find each other, and what happens when they come to see
each other as long-lost “friends”, even if neither truly believe anyone can
ever be a friend.
The clash is of human endurance, not goals. We do not see a
careful craftsman or a droll drone in either of these men. Scenes of a
seemingly brilliant and boisterous man losing his temper over semantics is not
the portrayal of anyone we are being told to think of as malicious or
malevolent, or even manipulative. Scenes of resistance and resilience in the
face of simple temptation with little consequence for the taste will not
provoke a sense of patsy or sycophant.
The two instead are good soldiers, staunch and stalwart,
holding their post against all odds with general conviction as to how they have
arrived. The signals they send out are not for aid but as a signal, a flare, to
remind that they are still here. Whether we “side” with either of them is
inconsequential. They are usually too far out of reach, we being one of the
messages that did not make it through the enemy barrage. However, in them we
see those forces of containment we so often see in ourselves, and we see how
these two are dealing with it, respective of who they are as people.
In long holds or slow tracking shots with very little camera
motion and drawn pans into the occasional close-up or intimate conversation we
are not invited to take what we want from the scene, but to see what is there. Only
twice does the camera give a perspective shot, and the scenes are so stark and
stripped we immediately recognize the unreliability; even if we could touch these
two, feel them in us, we would be at loss for which way to begin looking,
wanderers we be, not travelers. What we take has little to do with how we
respond to the characters, but how we respond to our notion of who they are and
why they are acting as they do, as we would someone we know. They do not do
“good” or “bad”. They do “them”. How we
react to that and comprehend that says as much about the structure as it does
about sensibilities.
We are meant to fall asleep next to the sand figure, someone
to hold, but just as easily slipping through our fingers. As sand itself never
forms much of a solid foundation, in a lifetime when all we seek is to become
something else, we are constantly escaping our own grasp; others are even more
ethereal. The warmth in this movie is for those who seem to be what the
resilience will push away, not for those close to us, proximity or “personally”.
We repeat over and over a process that does little to show anything other than
our own need to understand ourselves through someone else and somewhere else.
Whether we try to explain our dream or ignore it or rage against it, we are all
too often found in the same cells, right next to each other, far more often
shouting for everyone else to shut up, no matter how comforting or close they
could be.
A film certainly of ironic and enterprising imagery,
Anderson concludes the true “film season” with a Man vs. Man vs. Fate vs.
Society story, pitting us not on any side but rather wondering as per what side
we are on, and whether we believe in our own explanations enough to think that
if we are not helping, we are failing. Perhaps we might even wonder what
exactly we might measure as failure.
DA DA DA DA DUM DE DUM DUM DUM! BA WHOOP!
Production of Ebert's Equivalent (c) 2012 :-)
DA DA DA DA DUM DE DUM DUM DUM! BA WHOOP!
Production of Ebert's Equivalent (c) 2012 :-)
